But I'm curious, do you ever get pushback from people that you're working with or people in the organization that say, what are you talking about, heart center?

Yeah, there's a lot of people in the business world that struggle with that.

And I understand it.

I try to create something Places in their lives where they've already had experiences so they can tap into it and know what it means.

The biggest challenge for leaders, whether they're a supervisor or a president or CEO of a company, it really doesn't matter.

The biggest challenge they have is they are chartered with getting results.

They have to.

But for someone listening, that's like, well, what does that actually mean? And if I'm the CEO, how do I even begin that?

thank you thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom to us as well as to the world and today let's talk about your organizations is alive the leadership shift that changes everything so what does it mean to say an organization is living entity and how does that change what a leader does on a monday morning

the shift in what i call shift in paradigm or shift in the framework is to help leaders better understand uh the problems they face and the way to address it if you look at the traditional view of the organization it's considered a simple black box it takes inputs produces outputs and the leader's role is really to design that box, that machine, so that it is as efficient as possible in transforming those inputs to the expected or required outputs.

In that model, the leadership is to design the processes, set the goals, establish the framework, establish the structure, and the employees are really just simply component parts of that machine to follow the instructions that the leader has set forth.

Those instructions take on the form of the strategy, the goals, the KPIs, the process guidelines that are established within the organization.

That's the traditional view.

There's some real problems with that that has been showing up since really the last 20, 30 years, I would say, as the environment that organizations operate in has transformed into much more complex environments where change is happening much more quickly.

And employees are much more educated.

That's j-e-r-r-y dot a-i slash l-i-b-s-y-n.

Let's talk about relationships.

Absolutely.

Well, so in the book, in, in the first book, I've hypothesized and, and formulated that what creates results for, for a machine is primarily the activity of the machine, the processes, the, the g- the connections, the, the, um, uh, way you measure it, and, and, and the goals you set, and, and, and the components you put in the machine, right? That's, that's what makes a machine.

The design of the machine is basically where everything lies.

People, however, have other f- other, I call them the hidden forces, as you pointed out.

They have other dynamics that impact the way they respond to, to life.

So- Op- optimizing the activity of people, you know, we wanna be efficient, we wanna save energy.

[chuckles] Yeah, develop the people

So what inspired that shift in thinking?

Well, a number of things throughout my life.

Certainly my early career, the things I mentioned to you, failing at leadership made me really look at what does it mean to help an organization a group of people who come together for a common purpose, what what really drives them to actually perform well.

Certainly, you have individuals within the group, but you also have the group itself as a whole.

And, and as I, without really having a framework or an understanding, I found over the course of my career, both within Hewlett Packard.

And then when I left them in 1988 and started to consulting, so I began to work with lots of different organizations.

I noticed each organization had their own, you might call it their own personality.

And, you know, young professionals today, right, they often think leadership is about having all the answers, right? So how has your definition of leadership, should I say, changed over the years, basically?

what an

attitude to carry into business and into my life.

So it kind of set a stage for why is that? Why do we have that feeling? Within HP, my career started out very positive as a regional systems engineer, helping salespeople, helping customers, applying the equipment we sold them and helping them with software design.

And then I was given an opportunity to move into management.

But the management career I took was in the district service manager.

I didn't know anything about fixing computers.

So here I am, a brand new manager, dealing with people who come from a different world than I do, see the world through a different lens than I do, solve the difference of the problems than I was ever used to solving.

Have you seen that? And if so, what's up with that?

origin story? Where'd you come from, Norman?

I was born in a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York.

My mom and my grandparents actually migrated from the – they were evicted during the pogroms in Russia and Poland.

My mom was actually born in Poland.

And they migrated through Israel.

My grandfather came over, established himself in the U.S., then brought the family over.

So that's kind of the contextual background of my family roots.

How do I change that?

Mm

... we've relegated people to being good component parts.

And this goes back to our education system, uh, which was designed to create workers for the modern-day factory, right? The, the industrial, uh, era.

Um, and, and we're taught, you know, you ...

In school you learn very quickly how to prepare for tests, how to prepare yourself to be evaluated, and that same mindset gets carried forward into, into business.

Uh, there was a time when universities were really more interested in developing critical thinking, where today they're, they're mostly oriented to creating workers for the, for ...

That can be hired by business.

Hmm.